I’ve been procrastinating updating my site for a while: noodling with layout ideas; thinking about whether I should rework abouthalf.com to be simply a portfolio site (since most of my blogging takes place on Blueplate Bachelor nowadays anyway) or setting up a sub-domain for my professional activities; and how to handle putting up snapshots and portfolio pages.

Flickr’s service is the most obvious, whitest, elephant in the room - just sitting there, begging for e-peanuts (enuts?), hoping to serve my pics up to the disinterested masses. Obviously lots of people use flickr and sing its web 2.0 praises. I have a number of flickr feeds bookmarked for regular perusal. There’s some great stuff there. But I’m still gun-shy about using it for my own site.

Here are my pros and cons:

• Pros
  1. Flickr provides an easy recovery or backup if I lose my images or all my hard drives suddenly go belly up.
  2. I could share photos in and out of the context of my site (e.g. more options for reaching an audience)
  3. All the cool kids are doing it.
  4. Flickr provides many methods to upload photos (email, phone, traditional upload) which means I could easily pop a pic online for somebody pretty much anyplace, anywhere, anytime.
  5. There are many tools, plugins, apis, etc which allow Flickr content to be integrated into your web site.
• Cons
  1. flickr.com is blocked by many corporate firewalls (at least mine). If I’m using my site for self promotion, that can become a roadblock.
  2. Flickr’s search features make it very easy for some lazy, dishonest art director to steal your pictures and use them without attribution. (no. really.)
  3. What happens when Yahoo (flickr’s owners) decide to become evil? Do they own all your pictures? Do they claim copyright? Do they start selling your pics back to you?

Clearly the only solution is to noodle around with the service and see if I like it or not, and see if the wacky fun webbiness outweighs my concerns. Film at eleben.

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